Through the Looking Glass
by Dune
Summary: She doesn't to let go of him. Rose Tyler's journey through the dimension. Post Doomsday.


Notes: Again, a ton of love for my beta xwingace who helped me a lot with this. It's mainly her encouragement that made me post this, I'm still watching for stray bullets  
Post-Doomsday fic. Yet this is not an AU!fic and it is no denial!fic. Just so you know before I make you unhappy. Still hope it's worth reading though.

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"I located the fault line between the dimensions, it's near Westminster now. I can't wait for the team, it'll shift again before they arrive. I'm going through. If you… if you see my mum and dad… tell them… tell them goodbye."

_- Torchwood telephone archive, Entry #875, Agent Rose Tyler on case #455, last known contact_

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The streets illuminated by the weak morning sun are empty.

Not empty in a sense she knew, not empty like they'd always been early in the morning, after a long night in the clubs.

Silence makes her stop and look around.

There is no sound. No tipsy girl shouting at her boyfriend for flirting with the DJ, no footsteps, no cans being kicked down the streets, no cleaning cars gathering the remains of a long Friday night, no seagulls noisily searching for another uneaten chip.

No cars, no people. No nothing. Just the faint echo of a breeze caressing the edges of the empty streets.

Nothing. She shivers.

She feels oddly relieved when a graffiti on the wall shows the Preachers, part of Torchwood's elite force now, had been here, once when they had tried to stop Lumic. No other graffiti has encroached on the words, though they are visibly faded from the weather.

This isn't her world, the world she came from.

For the first time she's relieved it isn't. Her world is still out there, functioning. She wanders aimlessly, dazed by the empty city. There is no one here but her.

"Hi,"

The male voice is like a thunderclap. She jumps and turns to see a rather shabby person, shouldering a rucksack and offering his dirty hand.

"I'm Alan," the stranger continues when she just stands and gapes "and I'm the last human."

_The physicists of Torchwood had told her about the weird transdimensional readout in the middle of London and of course hearing 'transdimensional' she was the first to volunteer for the job.  
It was nice to be in her old neighbourhood again, although in this world she had never grown up anywhere near the Estates. It still felt oddly like home when she rented a small flat for the duration of the mission. A home away from the home she lost._

_She'd hunted the glitch for weeks, scanner always ready, sifting through the crowd, expecting to see a familiar face in pinstripes, ploughing through the dimensions just for her._

_She still couldn't let him go._

_She kept looking and finally stood in front of the tiny crack in space-time. Closing her eyes she activated the pandimensional teleporter and wished herself back to the other side of the looking glass._

_Nothing had happened._

_And when she'd opened her eyes again silence was everything she could fathom. _

"I never imagined people before." The guy identifying himself as Alan stops, frowning.

"But then sooner or later I'd had to imagine a beautiful girl I think. And don't you dare say the 'Not if you're the last man on Earth' line, that joke grows so stale after a while."

_It doesn't take her long to convince him she's real, he is smart enough to know that apparitions usually can't pinch that hard. _

_Rubbing his arm disbelievingly he offers her tea. It's obviously the politest thing he can think of. _

"The plants are still here. The houses… As is meat, " he rummages through his rucksack and waves some canned Spam at her "and the dead," he mutters quietly. "Everything else was just _gone_ one morning."

_He offers her more tea and she notices how thin and calloused his hands are. Looking so much like the Do-- _

"Must've had something to do with the nervous system perhaps," he continues suddenly, "electric impulses influencing the very fabric of this universe... did you know that the membrane potentials of neurons create enough energy to--"

_He grins when he spots her questioning look. _

"I'm a doctor" he explains and that makes her stifle a giggle.

_They share canned beans that night on a bonfire in Piccadilly Circus. Just because he likes being among statues of people, he tells her.  
She can't quite stop herself from feeling flattered because he chose the statue of Eros for their first dinner beneath the stars._

_He tells her he's from Glasgow and she marvels at the holes in his shoes, knowing that the day the dimensions crashed has been nearly 3 years ago.  
He survived. Still wants to. Because he doesn't want to be a lonely body floating down the Thames.  
The lines around his eyes tell her that it wasn't always such easy going as he makes it sound. A desperate journey that brought him to London, now moving from place to place, finding food. And people maybe._

_He has never met anyone._

_There are shadows dancing over his cheekbones when he stares into the flames. Already he looks too thin. Surviving gets tougher, she realizes as he offers her instant noodles as the next course._

_She sees the question why he is here and others are not is gnawing on his soul.  
He has no answer. He was ordinary before this, didn't wish for anything else. She doesn't try to find a reason, knows too well it's usually just coincidence that changes ordinary people's lives forever._

_She understands why he's so desperate for others when he holds her shivering body at nights, whispering sweet nothings into her ear as the city and the silence close in on her, threatening to devour her, London a graveyard, smothering her with darkness.  
In the morning he just gives her a big smile, offers tea, a shoulder for comfort. She wonders how he managed to keep sane so long on his own._

_She found herself another restless wanderer it seems._

_A wanderer walking in the middle of the street instead of the sidewalk, she has to get used to that again, she realizes._

_Now he is her companion._

_She calls him Doctor teasingly sometimes, after he mentions that he hates that and the word doesn't hurt her as much as it used to.  
The crack has shifted again and they try to keep track of it, following it through London for weeks. It's more fun than it was the first time, in a city full of people on her own. Her hand creeps into Alan's when they run again, trying to reach the gap before it disappears again._

_Most of the time they talk. _

_He has to get used to that again, but she has enough stories for them both.  
He flinches at the echo of his own laughter filling Harrods when she tells him how she hopped for her life. _

"I loved him." _She says after the story of her death. _

"I know."

_She realizes this is the first time she talked about it at all._

_They spend a month together, talking, salvaging food. Thanks to her he has an aim again, wants get home now instead of finding people.  
She thinks it fitting that they finally manage to catch up with the crack at the Powell Estate, near the children's playground where an alien once gave her a lecture about the Earth revolving._

_She looks at the clouds overhead. She can feel it now. Beneath her feet, the Earth is moving for the first time in years, but she isn't falling through space any longer. Doesn't cling but feels alive._

_She can't keep herself from kissing the shabby wanderer next to her when they shift back into a busy playground, children squealing at the two strangers appearing out of thin air._

_The readouts return to normal, just like the scientists expected. His life signature kept the pocket universe alive, without him it collapsed._

_There he stands, lost at the sounds washing over him._

"Has it always been this loud?"

_Torchwood won't need to debrief him, she's been there. He's free to go, never to return. Tough luck they burned the money they could find to light their fire at nights._

_She doesn't want to let go of him. _

She turns around, offering her hand. "Want to come with me?"


End file.
